Jiří Otradovec

* 1933

  • "When I arrived in Prague the next day, I was walking down National Street and there were girls walking next to me, some students apparently. And they said, 'There it was.' And they were looking towards a corner, a niche which is on National Street. And there was a photograph of Cardinal Tomášek. I said: 'Girls, what happened there? And they said to me, 'This is where we were beaten the most fiercely yesterday.'"

  • "My uncle always took out the faeces. And when he carried the bucket, he used to tie up his trousers legs and stuffed in the potatoes which had been cooked for pigs. So he was carrying it secretly to get more food, because the nourishment was minimal and poor. He said that even among the guards there were all kinds of people, that it happened to him - remembering it brings tears into my eyes - that there were people like that... A guard noticed something. He met him in the corridor, and they had to salute guards, he should salute him, and my uncle couldn't bend down, make a bow, because he had the potatoes tied there. Briefly, the guard guessed it, but, like, he closed his eyes at it, as they say. He just let him pass. And all this also aroused envy among the prisoners."

  • "Just by his ingenuity, he got from the front line, where a lot of boys died, to the kitchen by - as we used to say - simulating, pretending to have some kind of illness. The doctor saw him limping, and that was all he needed. My gradfather put such wooden pegs in his shoes so that it hurt him a lot, and he had to limp. The army doctor looked at him walking up and down and appointed him to the kitchen."

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    Brno, 10.08.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 02:15:20
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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The sky was just roaring

Jiří Otradovec, 1950s
Jiří Otradovec, 1950s
photo: Witness´s archive

Jiří Otradovec was born on 17 January 1933 in Prostějov. Shortly afterwards, he moved with his parents to Jundrov (now a part of Brno), where he lived through the World War II. In 1938, his father Ludvík and uncle František had to enlist after the general mobilization had been announced. During the war, the Nazis imprisoned his uncle František in Dachau. After finishing primary school, Jiří attended a private religious grammar school in Fryšták, and after the February coup in 1948 he went to a secret novitiate. In the fifties and sixties he took various jobs in Brno as a worker. In 1955-1957, the communists imprisoned his brother Ludvík, who was a Salesian priest. In the second half of the 1960s, Jiří moved to Levoča in eastern Slovakia to follow his future wife Julie. There he completed his education and worked as a nurse. In the 1980s, he visited his sister and nun Anna Otradová in Turin. On this occasion he also met Pope John Paul II, and due to that he was interrogated after his return to Czechoslovakia. In November 1989 he was accidentally in Prague. At the time of the interview (2021) he was living in Brno-Jundrovo.